RIGA - A man has been charged in a British court with being involved in a trafficking ring that whisked Latvian women abroad and forced them to work as prostitutes.
The case hinges on the testimony of an unnamed 25-year-old Latvian woman who has accused Nazif Selimi of repeatedly raping her and forcing her to work as a sex slave in Yorkshire, England.
Selimi, 27, confessed to the charge of arranging travel for sexual exploitation and profiting from prostitution but he denies the rape charges.
The woman told a British court that she went to Lithuania to work as an accountant to help pay medical bills for her young son.
According to the Yorkshire Evening Post, after the woman lost her accountancy job, she accepted an offer from three Lithuanian men to work as a prostitute in England for as much as 1,000 pounds per week.
Laura Dean, a researcher at the Riga-based Marta Women's Center, said that this type of case is typical of human trafficking in the Baltics.
"This woman is a classic example because she is someone looking for a better life 's a lot of these women come from desperate backgrounds. Traffickers can identify with this, and that's how they are able to do it," Dean told The Baltic Times.
When the woman arrived in London, Selimi allegedly "bought" her for 2,000 pounds from Lithuanian traffickers at a gas station in London before taking her to his apartment and raping her. He then drove her to Leeds where she lived with Modestas Kilinskas, another defendant in the case, and worked at a brothel in the city.
Selimi drove to Leeds at least once per week to collect about 75 percent of whatever earnings the woman had left after paying off her pimp. He also allegedly raped her multiple times during the visits.
The woman said she was raped yet again after asking Selimi if he could help her travel back to Latvia to see her sick son. Prosecutor Richard Woolfall said she later returned to Leeds to continue working as a prostitute despite the sexual abuse in a desperate attempt to earn more money for her son.
The woman "sacrificed her own well-being for him," Woolfall said at the court hearing.
Selimi pled guilty to four counts of facilitating travel within the U.K. for sexual exploitation and one count of controlling prostitutes for monetary gain. He denied the rape charges.
Kilinskas, meanwhile, pled not guilty to five counts of facilitating travel within the U.K. for sexual exploitation. Though the defendants face tough sentences if convicted, Dean said it would not be enough to deter people from committing these kinds of crimes in the future.
"The penalty for human trafficking is seven to 15 years in jail. But if you can make $25,000 off of one person, the punishment is not enough of a deterrent in most cases," she said.
